One afternoon in the heart of the Waso rangelands in Isiolo County, I was debating with Borana elders on the best measures to mitigate the effects of the recurrent droughts. An elder rose and gave wise counsel, saying he was nostalgic about the good old days, “when we had plenty of milk and households in Waso could effortlessly fend for themselves without help”.

The elder said that because of climate change and “external help”, they slaughter and sell part of the herd at a low price to be eaten by others for nutritional gain. He concluded, “if they share our concern, tell the external agents to outwit the vultures and come earlier”, implying that most support arrives too late, at the height of an emergency, when herds have been partly decimated by the drought and the vultures have already arrived to scavenge for carcasses.

While said tongue-in-cheek, the elder’s request underscores the frustration felt by the “beneficiaries” because of the external agencies’ apparent lack of a basic understanding of dryland dynamics and the challenges of getting needs right.

The drylands

The drylands are an extremely heterogeneous environment characterised by among others, low erratic rainfall, high inter-annual climate variability and ecological uncertainty. Globally, drylands occupy 41 per cent of the earth’s land surface and are home to approximately 35 per cent of its population. The dominant livelihood systems in the drylands are pastoralism, agro-pastoralism, and some rain-fed agriculture where the local communities tap into their knowledge to live with uncertainty. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, an estimated 50 million pastoralists rely on the drylands environment for their livelihoods.

Although historically these regions are considered to be of low economic potential, their diverse pastoral groups play an important role in the modern economy. For example, livestock production in the drylands contributes over 35 per cent of the agricultural sector’s contribution to Kenya’s GDP and accounts for over 80 per cent of household income in the drier regions, employing thousands of people in livestock production and marketing.

Yet despite the potential of the arid and semi-arid areas, the majority of the population in this regions of Kenya lives in deep rural poverty. According to a recently published socio-economic blueprint for Frontier Counties, about 20.5 per cent of Kenya’s poor live in the frontier counties and 64.2 per cent of this population lives below the poverty line, compared to a national average of 36.1 per cent.

The reasons for this lie in both how national planners and policymakers view dryland areas and how investment decisions are made in these regions. Although there have been some changes in some drylands counties following devolution, the knowledge base that has shaped development in this region largely remains the same.

Common misconceptions

Knowledge is key in the interaction of humans with the ecological system, especially in arid areas. However, understanding the challenges facing this important region has been impeded by a number of misconceptions including that: compared with other areas which have traditionally been recognised as “high potential areas”, drylands are remote, poor and degraded and are of little potential except for tourism; dryland areas have low biological productivity compared to the highlands and as such, they are of little economic value apart from providing a means of subsistence to those who live there; dryland communities are a helpless group with weak means and a low adaptive capacity to manage uncertainty; drylands cannot yield a satisfactory return on investment due to the climate risk associated with variable and erratic rainfall; dryland communities are weakly integrated into markets because of their remoteness, their poverty and their reluctance to sell their animals.

Most externally-driven technical solutions continue to be based on misconceptions, including critical elements of planning which are based on partial values of these areas, rather than their total economic value. Being unable to place a value on marketable assets in the arid and semi-arid areas of Kenya, decision-makers dwell much more on the erroneous narrative that pastoralists are not market-oriented. Substantial resources are spent on trying to make pastoralists responsive to the market without addressing the underlying structural challenges of the livestock value chains.

Over the years, the government’s attempts to tap the livestock wealth of pastoralists have not been systematic but have come in waves. These attempts started in the mid-1930s and provoked the famous Akamba Political Protest against forced destocking and the failed attempts to develop stock auctions. Then came the era of the ecological argument that is based on the carrying capacity of the range, and the efforts to force a higher offtake rate in the second half of the 1950s. There followed a number of disjointed livestock development programmes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Scholars argue that “unfair terms of trade” made these government-led initiatives unattractive.

Pastoralist value chains

Although livestock has traditionally constituted an important currency in most African societies, this is no longer the case in Kenya which has a “crop bias” where agricultural products like tea and coffee are priority export crops and are therefore given the necessary policy support.

This bias was introduced during the colonial era where the settler-occupied “White Highlands” constituted the political and economic core. While there was a fair demand for livestock products in the downcountry, the market was tailored to the needs of the white settlers who influenced the location of key infrastructure, regulations, and governance that barred African herd owners from integrating into the national marketing structure. A good example is the location and operation of the Kenya Meat Commission, which was purposely designed to support the movement of animals slaughtered by white settlers and had little consideration for African herd owners.

Little has changed since independence and post-liberalisation. Persisting elements of colonial legislation such as restrictive livestock movement permits, unfavourable movement schedules and restrictions on trading licences have historically skewed the pastoralist’s relationship to the market.

To date, markets are largely controlled through the organisation of ethnic trade networks where some non-pastoralist groups have better connections to the urban space and a more supportive business environment and subsequently control important activities downstream of the chain.

A good example is the trade network for sheep and goats that extends from Moyale to Kariobangi in Nairobi that systematically locks other pastoralist groups out of the downstream trade at the terminal market. The ownership of slaughter facilities and connection to specific clients for largescale slaughter offers members of this trade network certain preferential trade advantages.

Markets are largely controlled through the organisation of ethnic trade networks where some non-pastoralist groups have better connections to the urban space.

Generally, the trade in livestock from the arid north has always been risky and full of technical pitfalls. Even for today’s professionals, it is booby-trapped with many uncertainties that call for constant creativity and business shrewdness to survive the perennial losses.

The trade in live animals presents multiple risks in the form of quantity losses (reduced weight and number) and quality losses such as altered physical appearance. Animals have a limited shelf life, particularly in the urban environment; after being taken out of their production environment, their appearance deteriorates due to the different climatic conditions and lack of proper forage, which reduces their potential selling price. At times, major losses occur when the animals cannot be sold immediately and their upkeep at the terminal markets leads to high transaction costs.

There are also economic losses, which represent the difference between the potential and the actual economic benefits. In effect, at almost every stage, the livestock entrepreneur is faced with the daunting task of making risky decisions mostly based on incomplete information and under duress.

A second technical problem is the lack of clear demand and supply specifications. Different markets favour different types of livestock while the retail prices fluctuate all the time in tandem with changes in these forces of supply and demand. A trader must make delicate decisions almost every day as to what kind of animals they should buy, in which areas they can buy the livestock, and which of these areas offer supplies at the lowest price. At the same time, the trader must also have some knowledge of which terminal market in the downcountry will offer him the widest profit margin.

As the trade network extends towards the terminal markets in Nairobi, trade relations between the pastoralist traders and the clients who could share more precise market information are further weakened, widening the gap between supply and demand and increasing the economic losses of the traders. It is thus essential that traders have accurate day-to-day information about the shifting supply and demand.

The third problem that faces traders are the unfavourable terms of trade along the pastoral livestock value chain due to the many structural challenges related to price volatility, information asymmetry along the chain, high transaction costs and weak livestock marketing policies.

The long absence of a comprehensive livestock marketing policy (the livestock and livestock product marketing board bill was only passed in 2019) set the stage for minimal investments in marketing infrastructure such as meat processing facilities, cold chains, logistics, and limited coordination among actors.

This has resulted in weak governance of the value chain and contributed to post-harvest losses. Although some marketing aspects were incorporated into the National Livestock Policy Sessional Paper no. 2 of 2008, it still does not specify in detail ways to streamline livestock marketing investments and the sustainable integration of pastoralist livestock producers into the value chains.

Inclusive value chain

As the northern arid areas increasingly become indispensable to the national economy in the face of the emerging oil boom and the expansion of infrastructure corridors, there is a need to realign the value chain agenda with government, donor, and private sector investment priorities.

Already, many county governments in arid and semi-arid counties are leaning towards the regionalisation of livestock markets through the construction of large-scale abattoirs (in Marsabit, Isiolo, Samburu, Wajir and Garissa Counties) and targeting of high-value meat export markets in the Arabian Peninsula. While such efforts are welcome, they should be preceded by discussions on the governance of the value chain, particularly on the position of pastoralist producers in the chain, models of the proposed trading arrangements and opportunities to tap into livestock traceability and other associated opportunities for premium pricing of pastoralist livestock.

The key to unlocking the pastoralist value chain is establishing standards and linkages. The coordination of the value chain from upstream to downstream, improving the flow of market information and price accuracy, and providing a wider choice of potential buyers to livestock entrepreneurs and producers from arid areas are all necessary interventions. In some countries, more transparent trading arrangements, such as livestock auctions, have been tested and have proven successful at improving price transparency, coordination of sales and offering price competitiveness to livestock producers. To this end, the earlier we embrace an ICT trading platform as a step towards improving access to livestock market information the better.

The key to unlocking the pastoralist value chain is in establishing standards and linkages.

In effect, it is important to invest in appropriate ICT technologies that can offer a mechanism to crowdsource market prices to make real-time price information available to buyers and sellers, create a platform for open purchase and sales, improve logistics by maximizing availability and use of transport, and publicise the availability of water, vaccinations, breeding and financial services, among others.

Although still in their early stages, online livestock trading platforms such as Cowsoko are emerging to fix supply-side issues, address limited demand-side market information and improve accessibility to quality cattle.

Invest to produce quality animals

Improvement in rangeland management is another important aspect that needs proper investment. This should start with participatory rangeland mapping to articulate priorities such as the protection of key grazing resources and seasonal access. This could be complemented with a Geographical Information System (GIS) to produce digital maps displaying high spatial precision resource distribution.

Empowering local level governance systems such as Dhedha — the highest geographical unit for resource management among Borana herders — should follow such participatory mapping exercises. County assemblies should support these local grazing management institutions by developing appropriate by-laws. This will necessitate capacity building in by-law formulation and facilitating the by-law development process by the county assemblies. Investment in rangeland governance through agreements and the development of enforcement mechanisms in selected arid and semi-arid counties will also reduce incidences of conflict and foster peaceful coexistence within an agreed governance framework.

The earlier we embrace an ICT trading platform as a step towards improving access to livestock market information the better.

To improve the quality of animals, interventions in animal production should focus on boosting inputs and extension services. Input markets are flooded with sub-standard products, which expose livestock producers and affect the quality of their product. There is a need to streamline production support by embracing modern e-financing tools such as through the e-voucher, a customised debit (ATM) card containing different “e-wallets” which livestock owners can use to make purchases from selected agro-vets, enabling them to access various inputs such as vaccines, medicines, feed, feed supplements, extension services, veterinary care, Artificial Insemination services, among others.

In this regard, valuable lessons can be learned from the IFAD-financed Kenya Cereal Enhancement Programme – Climate-Resilient Agricultural Livelihoods Window (KCEP-CRAL) project where an electronic “e-voucher” scheme was extensively utilised to improve farmers’ access to Agri-inputs and to offer coordinated solutions through Public-Private-Producer Partnerships.

Today, Russian ideologues and propagandists are raising alarms over the “West’s attempts to introduce ideals and norms alien to Russia. They denounce the Russian opposition, which allegedly operates under “orders from the West.” And they stoke fears among television audiences that the West is preparing “nothing short of a war” on Russia. In turn, American, British and Western European commentators accuse the Russian government of waging targeted attacks on Western institutions and conducting an information war against the West.

While all this noise can be tuned out, if you pay attention for just a moment, you quickly realize that the point of all this sensationalism isn’t the content itself but the feeling of comfort these ideologues and publicists evoke. Amid all thе accusations of “Western operatives” and “hybrid warfare,” there’s a nostalgia for the former bipolar order in which Russia — or perhaps more specifically, the post-war USSR — had a clear and leading role. Western politicians and authors, meanwhile, long for times past when they were triumphant champions of the twentieth century’s global conflict.

Preparing for a war gone by

All of these mutual threats hark back to the Cold War, which was more than just a frozen standoff between two superpowers (played out in regional wars). It was also a clear and comprehensible system of international relations, especially when viewed from Moscow and Washington. Each of these global poles flew a flag that other countries were compelled or enticed to rally around — cozying up to the (capitalist) West or to the (socialist) USSR.

From the Western point of view, the twentieth century was dedicated to a deadly standoff against the ideologies of fascism and communism, followed by another one between capitalism and communism as political and economic systems. All of these worldviews and doctrines were formed in Europe more than a hundred years ago. In this sense, Vladimir Putin — who never tires of evoking Russia’s triumph in World War II and the resulting repartition of the globe — holds a distinctly Western point of view. His position may be contentious, but it’s framing is rooted in Westernism all the same.

Meanwhile, hidden by the pall of conflict between capitalism and socialism was another confrontation entirely. The Cold War ruthlessly dragged in third countries, quashing their pursuit of decolonization, sovereign nation building, and the formation of their own political systems, writes Yale historian Odd Arne Westad in one of the best books on the history of the Cold War.

From the Western point of view, the twentieth century was dedicated to a deadly standoff against the ideologies of fascism and communism, followed by another one between capitalism and communism as political and economic systems

From a non-Western point of view — or more precisely, from the point of view of most non-Western people — the main global development of the twentieth century was the appearance of independent nation states from the ruins of European and Asian empires. Of course, people in Egypt, India, China, Pakistan, and Thailand, can imagine what worries Americans and Europeans (indeed, thanks to the ubiquitous spread of the English language, this isn’t so difficult for them to do). But the world looks different “from the other side.” From the perspective of those outside of Washington and Moscow, what’s important isn’t the conflicts “within the Western world,” but rather the relations between former colonies (or states caught in the orbits of these empires) and former colonizers.

Human rights and democracy as neocolonialism

In this prolonged and painful conflict with the West, which goes back much further than the Cold War, Russia occupies a unique and dualistic position in terms of both geography and history. In a recent meeting with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov signed a joint declaration, “on several issues of global governance,” which stated that human rights should be protected “in conformity with national specificities.”

Legal mechanisms aimed at protecting the rights of the individual first appeared in international agreements and legal documents in the 1940s, at the end of World War II and the beginning of the post-war era.

The authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Charter of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, the European Convention on Human Rights and other documents from that period were driven by an effort to protect the groups and nationalities that were victims of the crimes exposed at Nuremberg and in other post-war trials. It was therefore imperative to create a concept of human rights acceptable to conservatives simply because up until the 1940s, the idea of human rights itself was associated with the revolutionary tradition of droits de l’homme and the communist movement. It was important for the Christian Democrats and other centrist parties to create a “Judeo-Christian democratic” version of human rights that denied the communists (who were popular in post-war world) a monopoly on human rights.

The mass killing and widespread suffering of those persecuted during the war years was heightened by the exceptional difficulties Jews and other refugees had crossing borders. Some countries wouldn’t let them out, while others wouldn’t take them in (this included the United States, as evidenced by the unforgettable tragedy of the Voyage of the St. Louis). Human rights protection thus had to exist at a level above borders. The idea of human rights protection, which was established in the Universal Declaration and other post-war documents, arose from the existence of a moral absolute that reigned supreme above nations’ sovereignty over their territory.

This in turn became a predicament for the Soviet Union, even though it was founding member of the United Nations and its ambassador, Alexander Bogomolov, participated in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The leaders of the USSR and the leaders of other socialist states and countries, which in the second half of the twentieth century were called the “third world” (in the sense that they were initially neither capitalist nor communist) came to see “western” human rights as a pretext for interfering in their affairs.

The communists and their satellites saw their human rights not as political and civil rights, but as social rights: the right to have a roof over one’s head, clothes to wear, employment, and social services. While, the West reproached the communists for violating human rights (through suppression of opposition and lack of elections), the communists reproached the West for violating of social rights (due to unemployment and extreme inequality).

Even though Russia has grown closer to China and comes out on China’s side in the battle with the West, Russia still belongs to the “historical West” and, as such, faces grievances from China — and the exact scale of these grievances remains unknown.

Today’s Russian leaders are fond of emphasizing their conservatism and consider themselves guardians of traditional values. Yet the version of human rights they choose is not conservative democratic — it’s socialist. That is to say, it’s based on social rights, rather than civil or political ones.

China has long been at odds with its Western partners over human rights. “China, along with the rest of the developing world, chooses to first prioritize economic and social rights, as opposed to the Western focus on civil and political rights,” explains Phil Ma, a researcher at Duke University. “These rights emphasize collective values and opportunities for economic growth, not just democracy promotion.” More importantly, criticism for human rights violations in Tibet and Xinjiang are taken by Chinese politicians not in the context of the recent Cold War, but in the context of the Century of Humiliation, the period that ended with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949.

The period from 1842 (the defeat of the Qing Dynasty in the First Opium War) to 1949 (the establishment of the People’s Republic of China), during which China lost a significant amount of territory and economic independence. China suffered one defeat after another at the hands of Western powers, which dictated trade conditions, including supplies of opium to China and taking Chinese cultural treasures to Europe. The destruction of the Old Summer Palace, burned and looted by the British and French during the Second Opium War in 1860, stands as a symbol of China’s foreign humiliation during this period.

In a broader context, contemporary Chinese state leaders act as representatives of a preeminent non-Western power trying to overcome challenges they inherited from the colonial period. These leaders therefore perceive human rights and the spread of democracy as nothing other than the West’s attempt to teach eastern barbarians to be “civilized.” Makau Mutua, a Kenyan-American professor at the SUNY Buffalo School of Law, calls this the “savages-victims-saviors” construction. This approach, in his opinion, is dangerously close to the old imperial notion that western civilizers are called to come and save eastern savages from themselves.

China’s Communist Party bases its legitimacy not in ideology, which lost its relevance when the Cold War ended, but in its role as a nation-building power. It was the party, after all, that brought an end to the era in which China suffered territorial and economic losses from the actions of great powers, namely Great Britain, France, the United States and, yes, Russia.

Celebrating victory over Russia

The Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra opens his book “From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia,” with a story of what the defeat of the Russian navy in the 1905 Battle of Tsushima meant to the world outside the West. Japan, which won the battle, was not the only country celebrating. This good news covered the pages of newspapers in Egypt, China, Persia, and Turkey. It marked the first time in the new era when a non-European country was able to defeat a European power in a full-scale military conflict.

Intellectuals and reformers from the non-European world have regarded that day as a pivotal milestone. Mustafa Kemal, who would later come to be known as Atatürk, wrote that he became convinced at that point that modernization according to the Japanese model could change his country. Jawaharlal Nehru, the then future first prime minister of independent India, recollected how news of Tsushima gave him a breath of inspiration and hope for Asia’s liberation from their subordination to Europe. American civil rights leader and intellectual William E. Dubois wrote of a worldwide surge of “colored pride.”

Historically, Russia has been one of the colonialist powers. At the dawn of the new era, Russia was part of the West; it acted like a Western empire and was regarded as such by the non-European world. China’s grievances towards Russia, which essentially remain in place to this very day, are the standard objections of a former colony to a former colonial empire. When Deng Xiaoping met with Mikhail Gorbachev in Beijing in 1989, the Soviet leader was taken back by the array of “old” issues raised by the Chinese leader. Gorbachev had arrived to iron out relations with the USSR’s partner, only for the Chinese leader to remind him of Russia’s Tsarist policies, humiliations from years past, the territories ceded to Russia in the Treaty of Aigun and the Treaty of Beijing, and China’s resulting territorial disputes.

The communists and their satellites saw their human rights not as political and civil rights, but as social rights: the right to have a roof over one’s head, clothes to wear, employment, and social services.

Gorbachev, like all Russian leaders existing within the Western political agenda, couldn’t come up with a response “Protocol dictated that Gorbachev reply by laying out our position, our vision, but he didn’t do that, as he wasn’t prepared for such a reception. He was silent, effectively agreeing with Deng Xiaoping’s rendition,” recalled Andrei Vinogradov, a China specialist from the Institute of Far Eastern Studies, in a recent interview. In China, the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict is also seen as a “pushback against the northern aggressors.” On a recent anniversary of the clash in China, participants of the events were honored with awards.

In March 1969, an armed conflict broke out between the USSR and China over Damansky Island (Zhenbao Island), which is located near Manchuria. The Soviet Union regarded the island as its own, while the PRC saw it as territory Russia obtained thanks to colonial treaties. The clash killed 58 Soviet military personnel and injured 94 others. Estimates of the Chinese casualties range from 100 to 300, though the exact number remains unknown.

The island went to China after the border demarcation in May 1991. China acquired several other islands and territory totaling more than 300 square kilometers (nearly 116 square miles) during demarcation in 2005.

A Different historical perspective

Although the European Union continues to be Russia’s main trading partner, trade with China is on the rise. While seven years ago, the volume of EU trade with Russia exceeded trade with China five times over, today it’s only twice as large. China has already overtaken Germany in the role of Russia’s primary supplier industrial equipment. The relatively modest amounts of Russian natural gas exported to China are now increasing. Military collaboration is becoming ever closer and is most evidently expressed in the form of joint drills. There are realistic prospects of Russia gaining entry into China’s technological sphere of influence, specifically in the area of 5G network construction.

In his research examining the prospects of Russian integration into Pax Sinica (China’s geopolitical space), Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, has found that for the time being China is exploiting its economic advantage, mostly by extracting better terms of trade — specifically, reduced prices for oil and gas. As Russia’s dependence on China grows, Chinese politicians could very well start to pressure Russia in areas other than commerce, for example to end military alliances with PRC antagonists, or to convince Central Asian countries to permit Chinese military presence on their territory as security for the Belt and Road Initiative. Short-term gains for Russia could turn into long-term losses.

While it’s still expedient for Kremlin politicians to play the role of zealous warriors against the West, Moscow’s non-Western partners have a much longer memory than the Russians do. The Kremlin’s logic is clear, but it’s dictated by views that were formulated during the Cold War years. The Russian perspective encompasses merely several decades, while Chinese politicians view Russia — and the rest of the world — from a centuries-long perspective. Thus, even though Russia has grown closer to China and comes out on China’s side in the battle with the West, Russia still belongs to the “historical West” and, as such, faces grievances from China — and the exact scale of these grievances remains unknown.

–

Editors note: This article was first published in English by the Russian publication, Meduza.

If we keep seeing incessant calls for decolonizing knowledge, research and teaching, that’s owed to stubborn imperfections in the political architecture of the Ivory Tower. The university is a site where colonial frames survive in the material and immaterial features of academia – whether in financial, linguistic, architectural, political or mental spheres. While these frames are cross-cutting, as the writings of Edward Said, Angela Davis, bell hooks or Aimé Césaire and others taught us, this essay focuses on epistemics, that is – in a nutshell – the ways in which we create, shape and legitimise knowledge. Inspired by Spivak and others, the starting point here is the observation that colonial imaginations keep questioning whether the subaltern can speak, leading – in academia and beyond – to longstanding trajectories of epistemic violence, marginalisation and exclusion.

Colonial frames are constructed to systemically preserve political, moral and economic authority of the people and nations that gained from exploiting others, or, for the very least, from imposing their worldviews. Some of it, however, is rooted in the pre-determined shaping of our thinking, the ways in which Western mindsets and mental frames are conditioned by a reproduction of in-group thought and truism in socialisation and education. This follows established colonial trajectories, but – going back to the opening line – it most virulently plays out where scientific capital is most powerful. This place is the Western university, flanked by an oligopoly of academic publishers and – crumbling but still unparalleled – funding schemes for research. Scores of writers, theorists and commentators regularly remind us of these issues. They point out how, despite the momentum to mobilise decolonial struggle, in academia and beyond, progress is slow. Like a turtle, colonial structures and institutions prove enormously resilient in defending an exclusive ‘permission to narrate.’

But what if Western thought itself is a victim of its own (neo-)colonial attitude? Admittedly, we’re entering a semantic minefield here, since nothing justifies colonialism by any acceptable notion of values, let alone reverse victimhood. But, for the sake of an experiment, this piece will discuss how colonial frames also harm the quality of individual and collective scholarship on the side of the privileged. Colonial socialisation and education do that by cutting to size our epistemologies as if we would be looking in the mirror when theorizing out of the window. As academics, Western-raised, Western-educated or both, we are trapped in our very own, self-made intellectual snares, complicating attempts to make sense of politics in most parts of the world. The writing process of a piece I recently wrote for ROAPE was good initial antidote, although I remain puzzled if it addressed only symptoms or actual root causes of my own incomplete mental decolonization process.

Dominant social theory is based on thought, conceptualisation and definitions developed by mostly Western scholars in their own lifeworlds. Hence, even if so-called fieldwork is done, analysis is usually done back home. It is therefore, knowledge situated out of context, with all its limitations. Human thought is dependent on language as a technique for both framing and transmission. Yet, concepts come into being through passive and active speaker competence, so it is rather difficult for someone who does not speak Yoruba, Arabic or Bengali to express the meaning of something in its context. Of course, we can translate, and sometimes chance helps making things fit, but more often, it results in erasure as specific type of epistemic violence. Forming precise equivalents of complex, situated social reality and abstraction into concepts faces problems of what Feyerabend  and Kuhn called incommensurability – the lack of shared language across scientific concepts and those discussing them – or Derrida’s idea of ‘untranslatability,’ the lack of exact equivalent across languages. Epistemic decolonisation hence requires linguistic emancipation on all sides of the table. We all use definitions, most of which are based on wording we are familiar with. Hence, even the most engaged and immersed ethnographers face multiple risks of imprecision, such as taking correlation for causation, as fans of econometric analysis do. For several reasons, hence, such as the refusal to engage in collaborative research, intellectual laziness, linguistic diversity, academic conventions, and forms of structural violence – just to name a few – we as social scientists are thus collectively racing into our very own epistemic surrender.

These shortcomings are particularly visible is the study of conflict dynamics and contentious politics in most parts of the world. To employ one of the few truisms I’d subscribe to, there surely is a correlation between the degree to which social phenomena are complex and contested and to which we need detailed context and information to avoid shortcuts, errors and misinterpretations. This exponentially peaks whenever translation issues come on top. But social theory is clever. Generations of scientists and researchers have been working on frames to both boil down complexity and to transfer social reality from where it plays out into spheres from where we target understanding and explanation. That’s legit to some extent because otherwise both case study research and generalisations would be worthless and obsolete. Yet, it is also not legit to posit such as generally and genuinely infallible or true. Dynamics of conflict, violence and politics tend to be mired by competing narratives anywhere in the world. Before and even into the era of alternative facts and fake news, this leads us to point at Otherness, to use diverging discursive construction to describe things that perhaps are not that different.

What we call ‘corruption’ in Africa is often referred to as ‘nepotism’ when we talk about Europe. What we subsume under ‘terrorism’ in the Middle East are the ‘individual cases’ of white people killing scores of people with assault rifles in the US, owing to ‘mental health issues.’ What we call mindless and savage violence in the Congo, are joint efforts in migration policy by the European Union. Intriguingly, the concomitant result is humans killed and public money embezzled in all cases. Of course, and luckily, lots of good social research is far beyond such crude Manichean clichés and tropes, but down the ladder of gravity we find similarly constructed problems.

As means of illustration, I will sketch two examples of epistemic challenges I have been facing. One is the ROAPE essay and another related one refers to an article Josaphat Musamba and I have been writing. In both, we have tried to investigate the “real governance” of conflict-affected mineral markets in the eastern Congo, a place where myths and stereotypes all too often clash with facts and analysis. In the course of the Congo wars around the millennium, the notion of conflict minerals arose to conceptualise the role of natural resources in a broader context of insecurity. Akin to existing – and problematic – assumptions on the economics of and in civil wars, this paradigm not only led to significant transnational policy but also framed an image of mineral trade and livelihoods as profoundly characterised by greed and violence. In consequence, a language of illegality and fraud came to dominate analyses on the matter. This however, shrouded our collective understanding of what mineral markets in eastern Congo actually look like, and why they work in the ways they work.

Instead, the conceptual arsenal of Western-dominated social science offered a number of theorizations ranging from neopatrimonialism, racketeering and greed to describe and analyse the personae of traders, business heavyweights and other participants of eastern Congo’s mineral markets. This is where we got stuck.

In our piece on the intermediary traders that oil cogwheels of domestic business – that is, before mineral goods are exported – we therefore had to look for solutions to name our protagonists. In French, the Congo’s colonially-inherited official language, these people are known as négociants – ‘negotiators.’ Now, negotiating is universal human activity and as such there is little chance of distorting the meaning of what these people do. Yet, it is insufficient to paint a fuller conceptual picture of their action and role. In this case, we did not find any further ‘emic’ (that means, arising from its very own, situated context) conceptualisation that would provide enough clarity. We thus began defining them as brokers of crisis. We did so because in the Congo, the notion of la crise is a ubiquitous reference and in literatures unsuspicious of too much colonial penchant, crisis is defined as “permanent or conditional category” or “ordinary and banal phenomenon.” Moreover, the notion of a broker, compared to that of a smuggler, is a functional term not a value judgment. In its broadest sense, it simply describes human connection for the sake to social, economic or political transactions.

The ROAPE article was a similar challenge, as it focused on another pivotal category of stakeholders in Congo’s political economy for which I borrowed the term incontournables. These are the people neopatrimonialism theory would call patrons, and Paul Collier would call them greedy. The incontournables are those, as the term suggests, that are hard or impossible to avoid due to their position and clout in a given context. Another emic solution, this term is French but while it comes out of a colonial language, it is used abundantly by Congolese. However, and most importantly, it is used in France itself with a positive connotation. There, for instance, extraordinary wines or outstanding literary works are incontournable. This is important, because while engaged scholarship is eminently political, we ought not to be blind as to the consequences of our epistemic choices. Hence, there is no issue with calling a corrupt person ‘corrupt’, but it is imprecise and prone to error to call entire groups ‘corrupt.’ Worse even, if we either use certain flattering (Western) language for ourselves, and pejorative (also Western) terms for the Other. Or if we simply decline to seek for emic, embedded meaning and explanation as we try to understand a context. All of that is amplified by a strong unidirectionality of scientific conceptualisation from the Global North to the South.

If these short examples are illustrative of the epistemic problems complicating social theory, they are not end points but mere entry doors into broader reflection. While decolonial scholars upped the game with works of enormous relevance – Kimberlé Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, Walter Mignolo and Boaventura de Sousa Santos to name a few – this debate also addresses our own issues, Western epistemic surrender. This means two things – the problem itself and a potential solution. The problem is that Western social theory has since long committed epistemic surrender, surrender as in abandoning this epistemic struggle. However, this surrender – as a conscious objective – can also mean to actively work towards surrendering our frames of thought and more actively embracing and applying epistemics not inherently ours, on the African continent and elsewhere so that, as Achille Mbembe suggested, ‘we will no longer have a university. We will have a pluriversity.’

–

This article was first published in the Review of African Political Economy Journal.